DeCordova's 'Platform' series offers intriguing fun

Sunday

Jun 8, 2014 at 12:45 PMJun 8, 2014 at 12:45 PM

By Chris BergeronDaily News Staff

LINCOLN - Though filmed on the grounds of the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Alix Pearlstein’s seven characters take anything but a relaxing walk in the park in her portentous short video now showing at the Lincoln museum.Instead, the New York artist has choreographed a hypnotic pas de deux between barely-moving actors and the slowly tracking camera that looks like an ominous Kabuki play taking place around several sculptures on the grassy lawn.Made last year and now screening through Oct. 13, "Alix Pearlstein: The Park’’ is the 14th incarnation of the deCordova’s Platform series that showcases early- and mid-career artists who’ve created work in varied media that responds to the museum’s "unique spaces, indoors and outdoors.’’Of the four new exhibits that opened last month, "The Park’’ should tickle visitors’ eyes while teasing their brains – in a good way.Showing distinct viewpoints simultaneously on three screens, Pearlstein’s immersive installation is both thought-provoking and a little creepy.Viewers will spend four minutes looking in three directions trying to figure out what’s happening and whether it’s profound, self-conscious fun or just an exercise in artsy manipulation.Wearing blue and black, professional actors sit or stand – or both – in groups, occasionally assuming the same positions as figures in famous paintings, such as Edouard Manet’s "The Luncheon in the Grass.’’Sometime the video emanates outward giving a viewer in the center of the gallery a sense of continuously expanding space, a sort of queasy, seasick feeling like astrophysicist Stephen Hawking explaining how the cosmos is endlessly expanding.A museum brochure accompanying the exhibit describe it as "a composite portrait-in-flux’’ of the Sculpture Park that "brings the outdoor experience into the museum to create an uncanny reflection of the visitor’s encounter with nature.’’Check out the Sculpture Park where you’ll mostly see parents with kids and art lovers wandering through the grounds, checking out sculptures, grooving on the spacious grounds.Then watch Pearlstein’s "The Park’’ and decide for yourself whether "life imitates art,’’ as Oscar Wilde claimed, or art transforms ordinary life into something ominous yet strangely engaging.For something entirely different, take the elevator to the museum’s Rappaport Roof Terrace and check out Roberley Bell’s fun and fantasical "The Shape of the Afternoon,’’ a collection of eye-poppingly bright faux garden sculptures that look like they belong in the kitschiest house in your neighborhood.You can sit on some of them and smell the real and fake flowers or imagine you've woken up in a cartoon.Looking over the railing toward the adjacent pond, visitors might wonder how Bell’s plastic fruit and fake flowers emphasize the distinction between the synthetic and natural worlds.If the artificial world is so garishly synthetic, Bell’s art prods visitors to wonder why so many people choose to live in that environment rather than the real one."Alix Pearlstein: The Park’’WHEN: Through Oct 13"Roberley Bell: The Shape of the Afternoon’’WHEN: Through Oct. 6WHERE: deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Road, LincolnINFO: 781-259-8355; www.decordova.org